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Joel Anderson

Joel Anderson is better known in the blogosphere and Twitterverse as blackink12 of PostBourgie. He is currently a newspaper reporter in Florida and has worked at several news organizations, including The Associated Press, for nearly a decade.

Jason Collins would never have been mistaken for an NBA player of much consequence. He has played for six different teams, four in the last five years. He has averaged as many personal fouls per game as points—often more—in seven of his 12 seasons. This past season could have been his last in the league, as his 1.1 points and 1.6 rebounds per game aren’t likely to be in demand on the free-agent market. In his first person essay in Sports Illustrated , Collins even ridiculed his own unremarkable career, writing, “I take charges and I foul—that’s been my forte. … I enter the court knowing I have six hard fouls to give.” Deadspin’s Drew Magary highlighted a tweet that was subsequently retweeted thousands of times: “Jason Collins has a career average of 3 pts and 3 rebounds per game. Gay or straight he should never be mentioned on Sportscenter.” Indeed, there seemed to be a broad effort in some corners to make Collins’s announcement seem underwhelming because he has been an underwhelming...

AP Photo/Matt York Phoenix Mercury's Brittney Griner, the number one overall pick of the WNBA draft, laughs during a news conference in Phoenix earlier this week. I t was in the locker room and on the field where Wade Davis felt most at peace with himself, which doesn’t sound unusual until he tells you that he was then a closeted gay man. “Sports was, for me, the safest place,” says Davis, an NFL and NFL Europe player from 2000 to 2004. Davis used football as a sanctuary from the rigid social hierarchy of middle and high school. Away from the game, away from his teammates, he struggled to focus on anything other than his inner turmoil and whether it was evident to his fellow classmates. To conceal his sexuality, he wore baggy pants and talked “with a twang.” “Anything to make people feel as if I was like everyone else,” says Davis, who finally revealed he was gay in January 2012. Little of Davis's experience squares with the prevailing narrative of the sports world—especially the NFL—...

AP Photo L ike many sons of the South, my father introduced me to The Game at a young age. Some of my earliest memories are of running around our living room with a Nerf football tucked under my arm, him playfully chasing after me. I spent plenty of time playing tackle football in the backyards around our suburban Houston neighborhood when some parents convinced my father to sign me up, at the age of ten, for the local Little League team. In Texas, ten years old is a little late for a boy wanting to play organized football. But I took to the game quickly, starting out as a quarterback (where I had the distinct skill of being able to remember all the plays), moonlighting as a defensive back for a couple of seasons, and then settling in as a running back in high school. Just like my father had. By my senior year, I had performed well enough to draw interest from a few small colleges. My parents nudged me to Texas Christian University, which was only four hours away. Two years later,...

In the annals of college football scandals, nothing about the details tying the University of Miami -- which started its season Monday with eight players missing after NCAA sanctions -- and dozens of its student-athletes to a rogue booster turned Ponzi-scheme convict seems all that fresh or uncommon. If the claims of felon and former Miami superfan Nevin Shapiro and the reporting of sports journalism's itinerant watchdog Yahoo! Sports are to be believed, there were extravagant parties at South Beach nightclubs and on million-dollar yachts, hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash handouts, and pimping. Of course, even the reaction among sports writing's pundit class sounds vaguely familiar, with renewed calls for Miami to drop its football program, tut-tutting about selfish kids, and a continued assault on the ideal of college athletes as amateurs who are students first. Nothing has changed since at least 1989 when Rick Telander, a former Sports Illustrated contributor and onetime...

Shirley Sherrod at her home on Friday, July 23, 2010, in Albany, Georgia. (AP Photo/Steve Cannon)

Let's review the past few weeks. The NAACP asked the Tea Party to condemn racist elements in its ranks, and the Tea Party responded with a fake letter from the NAACP to President Abraham Lincoln asking for slavery to be restored. Shirley Sherrod was fired from her job at the USDA over video of a controversial speech that turned out to be heavily edited . A white Bay Area Rapid Transit officer was convicted of involuntary manslaughter in the shooting death of an unarmed black man, a case that renewed concerns about tensions between police and the marginalized communities they serve. And all of this, incidentally, took place about one year after Cambridge police arrested Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. in his own home, and President Barack Obama orchestrated a Rose Garden beer summit to address tensions caused by the incident. If the Gates episode didn't make it clear, then these new events certainly should: We are horrible at talking about race in this country, and it's time we...